Played Solo, got all bounties, not that good. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, February 01, 2016, 19:05 (3454 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

I played entirely solo this iron banner. 23 games total in order to hit rank five. 4 games Friday, 15 Saturday, and 4 games Today. I Won 10, lost 13. I Completely all the daily bounties on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Also, I'm really not a good player at all.

Perhaps if was a different day of the week that was causing trouble?

Yeah most days the bounties were fine. I just got caught in a "perfect storm" today where matchmaking and the bounties conspired against me. The thing I take issue with is that the bounties are usually designed in a way that avoids such situations, but a few problematic ones have snuck in.

It sounds like to me that it wasn't the bounties fault, it was match making. I guess I just don't understand how the bounties can be at fault... I mean other than the fact that you have to win games to complete the bounties. But I mean, that is just a requirement to finishing the bounty. I could say that the bounties are at fault because I have to play PvP to finish them. Yes, I know that should never happen, but what I'm getting at is that I'm glad that everything you need rank up in IB doesn't involve just playing.

I'm glad there's more to it than "just playing" as well. I guess I spread the blame between the matchmaking and the bounties. Ideally, matchmaking would do a better job of setting up fair matches on a regular basis. But matchmaking is never perfect, even on the best of days. When we look at Iron Banner bounties, they are generally tied to personal performance, so players who are having bad luck with matchmaking can still rank up a bit each day. The whole nature of bounties (or challenges in Reach) is to reward players for their personal performance, separate from the other in-game goals (such as "win the match" or "kill this boss"). That's certainly not an air-tight rule. Bungie plays with different types of bounty goals on a regular basis. I just find it problematic in Iron Banner because it is a limited time event, and the rewards rotate in and out every month.

The situation I ran into certainly won't happen to everyone. It was partially a result of bad luck and timing. But it frustrates me because it is a completely foreseeable situation that is needlessly frustrating. Bungie has gone out of their way to make IB approachable for teams and solo players, and I think they've done a really good job of it overall. I also think that if I sat down with Luke Smith or Lars Bakken and said "dude, I played 2 hours of Iron Banner and didn't make an inch of progress towards my rep or bounties", they would say "woah, that's not supposed to happen. What caused it?".